As Our Parents Age | Timely Topics for Adult Children

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As Our Parents Age is a blog that offers real life experiences of taking care of aging parents. As Our Parents Age is my effort to record the experiences of loving and living with aging parents, but it is also a vehicle to help my husband and me understand and learn more about aging parent caregiving and medical care.

After I my recent post on hospital induced delirium, people begin chatting with me, unsolicited, about their elderly parents’ hospital experiences. Admitting an aging parent to a hospital appears to instill significant anxiety and resignation in adult children. The spontaneous conversations usually focused on the ways that hospitals, despite commitment to good medical practices, cheerful …

I’ve attended two farewell cocktail parties in the past two years, both scheduled as a substitute for aging parent funerals. Another friend invited everyone to a ballgame to celebrate a parent’s life with a memorial picnic afterward. And most recently I attended a theatre production to honor a deceased friend. While some of these families …

(An older post from 2015 that I’d like to share again.) On a daily basis I hear people use the word facility, and it’s almost always modified by the adjectives such as assisted living, nursing, and care. I’ll stand in the supermarket line and overhear a conversation between two people about moving a frail relative into a …

My husband and I have now offered support and reassurance to four older parents with memory loss. While each individual has experienced some type of dementia, all at fairly advanced ages, each of their situations has been unique. Each time the assistance we offered to our parents depended upon putting together a fairly complex puzzle …

Next summer my parents will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary. Newly married in 1949, they first visited the Shenandoah National Park during their honeymoon, and have since returned on their 40th, 50th, 60th, 65th anniversaries. We have the photos to prove it. My family members hope that we will all be able to help them …

An interesting article, Why Aging Middle-class People Can’t Afford Assisted Living, recently appeared at Philly.com, the online site of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Writer Stacey Burling describes research published by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a project that examined the future challenges of paying for the costs of assisted living, especially for …

Every time I chat with my friends and colleagues who are helping parents navigate through their older elderhood years, one person or another inevitably makes a comment about how easy it is and yes, a bit nerve-wracking, to picture being in the same fragile position as their parents. No one disputes that we all age. …

If you are an adult child with ninetysomething parents, you are probably familiar with the drill. Like me you may receive phone calls from an elderly parent a couple of times each week, usually asking a question, describing a problem, or just expressing anxiety. Or you may hear from caregivers about a problem — a …

I do not think a week goes by when one of my elderly parents doesn’t mention a strange phone call. They are always disconcerting and often scary, and older adult are prime targets. An excellent article, Die, Robocalls, Die: A How-to Guide to Stop Spammers and Extract Revenge, appeared this week in the Washington Post. The …

Last summer I went off to part one my scheduled yearly Medicare Wellness Visit the same morning I had an unscheduled visit to the dentist for an unexpected root canal. At the Primary Care Practice where I go, my physician divides the visit into two parts. The first part was with a physician’s assistant or …